This article analyses the organization of Chinese grassroots social management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on a range of local cases researched through policy documents, media coverage and interviews, we scrutinize the appropriation of emergency measures and the utilization of grid-style social management since the outbreak of COVID-19. Grid-style social management – a new grassroots administrative division aiming to mobilize neighbourhood control and services – is a core element in China’s pursuit of economic growth without sacrificing political stability. Conceptualizing grids as confined spaces of power, we show how the Chinese party-state is able to flexibly redeploy diverse forms of power depending on the particular purpose of social management. During non-crisis times, grid-style social management primarily uses security power, casting a net over the population that remains open for population elements to contribute their share to the national economy. Once a crisis has been called, sovereign power swiftly closes the net to prevent further circulation while disciplinary power works towards a speedy return to a pre-crisis routine.

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This article investigates China’s efforts to develop the administrative capacity of its border agents to effectively provide border security. It does so by contextualizing national efforts in relevant multilateral cooperation on border and immigration management. Regional frameworks such as ASEAN and Greater Mekong Subregion follow a regional border management approach that challenges Beijing’s notion of sovereign border management. However, China and the border provinces selectively engage in cross-border cooperation. These cooperation projects include training programmes for immigrants, standardizing and facilitating immigration procedures at the border, joint efforts against human trafficking and illicit border mobilities, and enhancing local cross-border relations. Against this background, this article investigates how norms – such as administrative capacity and cooperation through border liaison mechanisms – are negotiated, adapted, and practised in the different regional organizations, as well as how they are implemented locally in national immigration laws and procedures in Yunnan Province. The analysis builds on a multi-method approach including fieldwork, policy, and institutional analysis. The article finds that while Chinese local and regional security interests are closely intertwined, norm dynamics are not.

In the twenty-first century, governments around the globe are faced with the question on how to tackle new migratory mobilities. Governments increasingly become aware of irregular immigration and are forced to re-negotiate the dilemma of open but secure borders. <i>Rethinking Authority in China's Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular</i> investigates the Chinese government's response to this phenomenon. Hence, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese border regime. It explores the regulatory framework of border mobility in China by analysing laws, institutions, and discourses as part of an ethnographic border regime analysis. It argues that the Chinese state deliberately creates 'zones of exception' along its border. In these zones, local governments function as 'scalar managers' that establish cross-border relations to facilitate cross-border mobility and create local migration systems that build on their own notion of legality by issuing locally valid border documents. The book presents an empirically rich story of how border politics are implemented and theoretically contributes to debates on territoriality and sovereignty as well as to the question of how authority is exerted through border management. Empirically, the analysis builds on two case studies at the Sino-Myanmar and Sino-North Korean borders to illustrate how local practices are embedded in multiscalar mobility regulation including regional organizations such as the Greater Mekong Subregion and the Greater Tumen Initiative.

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